Saturday, July 3, 2010

Your Heart is Greater than your Wounds...

In doing a little research this a.m. I came upon another's blog. where a quote by Henri Nouwen says what I often say to my clients:

"You have been wounded in many ways. The more you open yourself to being healed, the more you will discover how deep your wounds are...The great challenge is living your wounds through instead of thinking them through. It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel your wounds deeply than to understand them, better to let them enter into your silence than to talk about them. The choice you face constantly is whether you are taking your wounds to your head or your heart. In your head you can analyze them, find their causes and consequences, and coin words to speak and write about them. But no final healing is likely to come from that source. You need to let your wounds go down to your heart. Then you can live through them and discover that they will not destroy you. Your heart is greater than your wounds."

Your heart, according to Easton's Bible Dictionary, is the 'home of the personal life'. So essentially what Nouwen is stating here is that no amount of study, no amount of intellectual knowledge will bring about change unless and until we choose to let it touch the core of who we are by taking tangible practical risks.